Beyond Guantánamo

Obama has to reclaim America’s human rights mantle—and not some day, but this year, when the world is watching.

On his third day in office, President Barack Obama signed executive orders banning the use of torture, giving senior officials one year to close Guantánamo, and ordering a review of detention policy. About a week later, in Washington, New York, and undoubtedly in other cities, many who worked to change Bush Administration counterterrorism policies, myself included, came together in living rooms and in bars–some shyly, others giddy, all slightly incredulous–and toasted. “What a difference an election makes!” many said.

“Not so fast,” others warned. “There is a lot on the President’s plate, and no one knows how the changes will play out or how prominent human rights will be.” Just a few months into the Administration, it looks like we were all right.

During her first trip abroad as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton assured the Chinese leadership that human rights would, in fact, not “interfere” with U.S. foreign policy. That message was jarring, particularly given Clinton’s own emphasis during her Senate confirmation on the need for more “smart power” and a better image of the United States abroad–not to mention her own history of activism on women’s and children’s rights (made manifest in Beijing itself in her famous 1995 speech). Was this what the naysayers meant by “not so fast”? What and where was the Administration’s human rights agenda?

But just when some sighed with relief that human rights could be neatly tucked away, it popped onto the agenda. Hours before Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev met in London in April, a prominent human rights activist was badly beaten in Moscow. This sort of thing is not an entirely rare occurrence in Russia today. This victim, though, Lev Ponamarev, happens to be an old friend of Obama’s key Russia adviser, Michael McFaul. In their meeting, Obama reportedly talked to Medvedev about the attack on Ponamarev at the behest of his adviser–and to the collective relief of the human rights community. In these early days, the China comment coupled with the Russia meeting reflect an Administration still finding its way, where hopes and aspirations live side by side with disappointment.

True, such human-rights muddiness is no different from any previous administration. Except that the immediate predecessor, the Bush Administration, talked about liberty while institutionalizing indefinite detention, and Obama promised to right those wrongs and restore America’s image–an implicit, if not literal, promise to put human rights at the center of his agenda. And it’s more than a matter of improving America’s reputation. The stakes are extremely high for the human rights community worldwide, and how the bureaucratic battle plays out means more than just a turf war between Administration officials.

It’s a point driven home by two major human rights reports, World Report 2009 by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Assessing Damage, Urging Action from the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). The World Report is a weighty compilation of short, substantive bursts of information covering a vast array of issues such as children’s rights, impunity, arbitrary detention, and responses by key international actors in a specific region. The information is arranged according to how HRW maps the world: One finds Russia, for example, in the “Europe and Central Asia” section, a placement I am familiar with, as I serve on its advisory committee. The more compact Assessing Damage, Urging Action is likely too dense for the casual reader (who might instead enjoy Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side), but for experts or those who want to know the global impact of recent policies, this book is essential reading.

I doubt, but hope nevertheless, that Administration officials will take the time to peruse both, since these reports come with something of a time-sensitive warning: If U.S. leadership does not play a decisive role in restoring human rights, including, but by no means restricted to, getting the American house in order regarding torture and detention, then 2009 and 2010 will not look all that different from 2008–which is to say, terrible.

The World Report, the latest 500-page annual review produced by HRW, is a stark, if not numbing, reminder that on the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, relentless cruelty and impunity have not been vanquished. Detention, torture, disappearance, enslavement of children, rape, repeated rape–the list of horrors in the report is long. These annual reviews, painstakingly prepared by staff around the world, often at great personal cost to those reporting, boil down the year’s crises so that even the most casual observer can quickly grasp the extent of abuses worldwide.

The annual review’s opening essay, by HRW executive director Kenneth Roth, provides context and policy exhortation. In the 2008 World Report, the call was for the European Union to step up to the plate, since the role of the United States was so impaired by its counterterrorism policies. The call in 2009, however, is to the new U.S. administration to immediately “undo the enormous damage” caused by Bush-era policies on counterterrorism, because the knock-on effect of the policies has fostered an apathetic attitude toward human rights around the world. In the past, even the worst offenders, as scholars have long noted, spoke in human rights-friendly terms. But as long as the United States is detaining without charge or torturing, oppressors the world over have been emboldened.

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